Poetry |

“Field Days” & “The Old Mill”

Field Days

 

 

Last together behind his wood shed,

making out against the worn shingles

until his girlfriend tracked us down, gripping

 

a pitchfork as if to run us out of some

old-timey town. We’d had it coming,

ever since the county fair — we met

 

at the dairy show, then rubbed up against

each other in the oxen barn near those two-

thousand-pound beasts who crapped everywhere.

 

When his girlfriend took him back

I came straight apart. He said something

about the ability to love many people

 

but being morally bound to only one.

He said it so earnestly.

I told him to just die already.

 

He hadn’t always been beautiful. Looking

through old photos I’d swiped from his top

dresser drawer, the ones before he’d figured out

 

how to dress, what to do with his hair —

I’d think, I’m not attracted to this man.

I would have kissed him back then

 

only out of sympathy.

His lack of beauty is what I cling to now.

Not us sneaking around, or the way

 

he’d take a block of ice in his hands and chip

off enough for our whiskeys, then kiss me

for an hour. The last time I saw him

 

he pulled a bobby pin out of my hair.

He wanted to run his hands straight through

my long bangs, and placed the pin

 

in my open palm. It was the last tender

thing he did for me. Ten minutes later

he was gone.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

The Old Mill

 

 

Down 100 along the White River,

between Warren and Hancock,

through a heavy door

propped open, I’d crept inside.

I’d gone there to meet Henry Parrish,

 

bicycled that afternoon past

Roxbury Gap and Moss Glen Falls,

until I’d reached the old woolen mill,

whose clapboards were the color

of newsprint. The mill stood

 

upright despite it all, three

stories high with a cupola on top,

the heavy timber framing still

grand as I entered the main room.

The machinery sold off years ago.

 

But signs of life all around —

beer cans crushed, resting on their sides,

take-out containers, cigarette stubs,

evidence of a small campfire,

a circle of ash. Off the main room

 

sat a lone cot, the mattress swelled,

discolored, the frame sagging,

broken-legged. I’d wondered

about this place for years,

and now to be here, waiting

 

for Henry, dotting cherry gloss

on my lips, as the 12-over-12

windows set a hazy glow all over.

Then I heard him, finally.

Henry slipped in as I did,

 

had ridden his bike along the river,

past the glass blowers,

past the old Granville Inn,

closed long before we were born.

He found a push broom

 

and swept an area as wide

as the two of us, laid down

the wool blanket he’d brought,

and I was woozy, the late-day

light all around us, pouring

 

through the windows,

the dust swirl everywhere.

He pulled me close and we kissed,

his tongue a thrill in my mouth.

I clutched him, held his sides,

 

trembling. He took my ear in his

mouth and asked if we could 69,

but I didn’t know what that meant,

so I said can we just make love?

Hoping that calling it that

 

would make it so — and he rolled

on a condom and laid me flat

and rose up on his knees.

I believed for a moment

he would make the sign

 

of the cross, and I thought

of my mother — how, in an instant,

I would become someone she

no longer knew. I wondered

if something cleaved in her

 

as it did in me —

if, at that moment in her garden,

or feeding the chickens,

she felt it, too? We moved

together, Henry and I —

 

I tried to keep up with him,

his knees sliding, the blanket

folding in waves against me,

the air a haze of silt, thick

with ruin — working to make

 

something beautiful in the old mill.

We left in a trance at twilight,

both on our bikes, a flashlight

pressed between my right palm

and the handlebar. I kept moving

 

until my tires found pavement,

the yellow dividing lines guiding

me home, as I pedaled away

from the old mill, the first

cathedral of my undoing.

 

after James Dickey

Contributor
Kellam Ayres

Kellam Ayres‘ poems have appeared in New England ReviewGuernicaThe Cortland ReviewThe Indianapolis Review and elsewhere. She was recently awarded a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and has also received support from the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of both the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Bread Loaf School of English. she works for the Middlebury College Library and lives with her family in rural Vermont.

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